We evolved in the forest roof to collect fruit and berries. True, after millions of years of evolution, we’ve developed ICBM’s and guns, and even flung a piece of metal outside the solar system. But despite supercolliders containing enough titanium wire to circle the earth sixteen times, we’ve no more of an understanding of the universe than the first thinkers of civilization. Where did it all come from? Why does the universe exist? Why are we here?

Where did it all come from? Why are we here? Switching our perspective from physics to biology undoes some of the biggest “facts” we’ve been taught about the world.

Our ancestors were challenged to believe the earth was round even though the horizon looked flat. Nothing in ordinary experience hinted at it: “If the earth were really round,” it was argued, “then the people at the bottom would fall off.” The notion of the earth as a ball of rock was nonsense 500 years ago. Years later, people accepted it as spherical, but saying it spun around the sun was more than they could fathom. No one could feel the earth moving. Indeed, if we were really whirling through space at 67000 mph then the hair would blow off our head.

This slideshow points out eight more scientific myths from the viewpoint of biocentrism. Switching our perspective from physics to biology provides answers to some of the biggest questions we have about the world, including life and death, time and space, and God and the universe.

We’ve been taught we’re just a collection of cells and die when our bodies wear out. But our belief in death is based on the premise we play little or no role in reality. However, experiments show the opposite: the observer critically influences the outcome. You can’t see things through the bone surrounding your brain. Everything is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. According to biocentrism, space and time are the mind’s tools for putting it all together. Death doesn’t exist in a timeless, spaceless world. Moreover, energy can’t be created or destroyed. Although bodies self-destruct, the ‘me’ feeling is just a fountain of energy in your head. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. It has no reality independent of you. Each person creates their own sphere of reality. Another well-known aspect of science is that observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Instead, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability. One mainstream explanation is the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation, which states each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the ‘multiverse’). Everything that can happen occurs in some universe. Death doesn’t exist in any real sense in these scenarios. All possible universes exist simultaneously regardless of what happens in any of them.

Every thinking person knows an insuperable mystery lies at the final square of the game board. When we run out of explanations and causes that precede the previous cause, we say “God did it.” In all directions, the current scientific paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to ideas that are ultimately irrational. But our worldview will soon catch up with the facts, and the old physico-chemical paradigm replaced with a new biologically-based one that can address some of the core questions asked in every religion. Ideally, our concept of God should adapt to this evolving scientific knowledge. At some point we’ll completely master our understanding of spatio-temporal reality. In fact, biocentrism suggests we may be able to recreate information systems to generate any consciousness-based physical reality fathomable. We may have the power to go back in time, to make a blind person see, or a crippled person walk. Science, like religion, must work with simple concepts the human mind can comprehend. But if biocentrism is right, nature has much bigger plans for us than just this or that life – plans far beyond anything organized religions have ever projected to any God.

If determinism is right, every human thought, feeling and action is the automatic and mechanical resultant of pre-existent forces. Indeed, most scientists believe the universe is a great machine set in motion at the beginning of time, and whose wheels and cogs turn according to laws independent of us. “Everything is determined,” said Einstein “the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” Even assuming an indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, many scientists still object that such indeterminism is for all practical purposes confined to microscopic phenomena and doesn’t allow for the traditional idea of free will. And if action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself would mean that traditional free will is absent, since such action can’t be controlled by a physical being claiming to possess free will. However, in biocentrism, you’re the agent that collapses events, not the other way around as we’ve been taught. You determine the path you take, not outside forces.

Evolution does an amazing job of explaining what happened in the past. But it fails to capture the driving force. Indeed, Nobel physicist Niels Bohr said, “When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We’re not ‘measuring’ the world, we’re creating it.” Attempts to explain the origin of the universe require an understanding of how the observer – us – play a role. There are over 200 physical parameters in the universe that could have any value but happen to be exactly right for us to be here. Tweak any of them and you never existed. Our special luck continues in the present time: All hominid species went extinct except us, asteroids could strike Earth at any time, nearby stars could go supernova, and supervolcanos could shroud the Earth in dust. These are just a few (out of billions) of things that could go wrong. According to biocentrism, it’s us, the observer, who create space and time (which is the reason you have to exist despite these odds). We collapse the present. Until the present is determined, how can there be a past? The observer is the vital force that collapses the cascade of past spatio-temporal events we call evolution.

Science asks us to believe the entire universe just popped into existence one day out of nothing. Physics is a kind of magic – 14 billion years ago over a trillion quadrillion tons of matter suddenly appeared from – zilch? Space and time – indeed the laws of nature – magically appeared as well. It’d be well to remember the experiments of Redi and Pasteur – who put to rest the theory of spontaneous generation, the belief that life arose from dead matter (i.e. maggots from rotting meat, mice from bundles of old clothes) – and not make the same mistake for the origin of the universe itself. Science has sought to extend space and time beyond our own emergence. It has followed our footsteps backwards through the lower forms of matter to the Big Bang. But experiments show before particles of matter can exist with properties they have to be observed. Something must sustain them above the void of nonexistence. That something is the human (or animal) mind. Strikingly, “Nothing” said John Wheeler, the great physicist “exists until it is observed.” We’re living through a shift in worldview, from the belief life is an insignificant part of the physical universe (and sprung into existence from the Big Bang or bundles of old clothes), to one in which we – not the Big Bang – are the origin.

We’ve been taught space is an object. It exists. It’s real. And that reality has been reinforced everyday of your life – every time you go from here to there, every time you reach for something. Examining space is as unnatural as scrutinizing breathing. In fact, the question of whether space exists seems silly. “Obviously space exists,” we might answer, “because we live in it. We move through it, we build in it. Miles, kilometers, cubic feet – all are units we use to measure it.” We regard space as a vast container without walls. But this is false. Consider: 1. Empty space is in fact not empty. 2. Distances between objects change depending on conditions like gravity and speed, so no bedrock distance exists anywhere, and 3) Quantum theory casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are truly separated at all, since entangled particles act in unison even if separated by the width of a galaxy. In truth, there’s no external matrix in which physical events occur independently of life. According to biocentrism, space is simply the mind’s tool for molding information into a multidimensional image.

Equally inconsonant is the question of whether time exists. A reply might be, “The clock ticks. The years pass. We age and die. Time is the only thing we can be certain of.” Time is easy to think about. Find yourself short of it – late for work – and issues of time are obvious: “My boss is going to kill me for being late.” We’re organized to think this way. We use dates to define our experiences to ourselves and to others. We’ve spent a lifetime believing time is an external, measurable reality. Yet we all instinctively know it’s not a thing. There’s a peculiar intangibility about it. You can’t bring it to the laboratory in a marmalade jar, like your kid brings home lightning bugs. That’s because it’s not physical. It’s a mode of animal understanding and doesn’t exist independent from life. “There’s no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world,” said Stephen Hawking “the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”

We’re taught the world can be divided into two entities – ourselves, and that which is outside of us. This seems logical. ‘Self’ is commonly defined by what we can control. You can wiggle your toes but can’t move the legs of the table. The dichotomy is based on manipulation, even if biology tells us we’ve no more control over most of the cells in our body than over a rock. The dividing line between self and nonself is taken to be the skin. This is reinforced every day of your life – every time you fill out a form: I am __ (your name here). But consider everything around you right now – this photo, for instance. Custom says it lies outside us in the external world. Yet everything you see and experience, including the trees and sky, are part of an active process occurring in your mind. You are this process, not just that tiny part you control. You’re not an object – you are your consciousness. You’re a unified being, not just your wriggling arm or foot, but part of a larger equation that includes everything you perceive. If you divorce one side from the other you cease to exist. That’s why in real experiments, matter, space and time depend on the observer. Biocentrism tells us your consciousness isn’t just part of the equation – the equation is you.

Lanza's Paper is the Cover Story of Annalen der Physik, which Published Einstein's Theories of Relativity

In his papers on relativity, Einstein showed that time was relative to the observer. This new paper takes this one step further, arguing that the observer creates it. The paper shows that the intrinsic properties of quantum gravity and matter alone cannot explain the tremendous effectiveness of the emergence of time and the lack of quantum entanglement in our everyday world. Instead, it’s necessary to include the properties of the observer, and in particular, the way we process and remember information.

The quest to unify all of physics into a “the theory of everything” has inspired a host of ideas. Now a pioneer in the field of stem cell research has weighed in with an essay that brings biology and consciousness into the mix.

Lanza featured on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC’s) Ideas, one of the oldest and most respected radio programs in the world

BEYOND BIOCENTRISM: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of DeathHost Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.

Reception to Biocentrism by Scientists & Scholars

“… Robert Lanza’s work is a wake-up call to all of us”—David Thompson, Astrophysicist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“The heart of [biocentrism], collectively, is correct…So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do NOT say it–or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private–furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no! Bless Robert Lanza for creating this book, and bless Bob Berman for not dissuading friend Robert from going ahead with it…Lanza’s remarkable personal story is woven into the book, and is uplifting. You should enjoy this book, and it should help you on your personal journey to understanding.”—Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University

“It is genuinely an exciting piece of work…and coheres with some of the things biology and neuroscience are telling us about the structures of our being. Just as we now know that the sun doesn’t really move but we do (we are the active agents), so it is suggesting that we are the entities that give meaning to the particular configuration of all possible outcomes we call reality.”—Ronald Green, Eunice & Julian Cohen Professor and Director, Ethics Institute, Dartmouth College

“[Biocentrism] takes into account all the knowledge we have gained over the last few centuries…placing in perspective our biologic limitations that have impeded our understanding of greater truths surrounding our existence and the universe around us. This new theory is certain to revolutionize our concepts of the laws of nature for centuries to come.”—Anthony Atala, renowned scientist, W.H. Boyce Professor, Chair, and Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine

“Having interviewed some of the most brilliant minds in the scientific world, I found Dr. Robert Lanza’s insights into the nature of consciousness original and exciting. His theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient traditions of the world which say that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world.”—Deepak Chopra, Bestselling Author, one of the top heroes and icons of the century

“It’s a masterpiece…combines a deep understanding and broad insight into 20th century physics and modern biological science; in so doing, he forces a reappraisal of this hoary epistemological dilemma…Bravo”—Michael Lysaght, Professor and Director, Center for Biomedical Engineering, Brown University

“Now that I have spent a fair amount of time the last few months doing a bit of writing, reading and thinking about this, and enjoying it and watching it come into better focus, And as I go deeper into my Zen practice, And as I am about half way through re-reading Biocentrism, My conclusion about the book Biocentrism is: Holy shit, that’s a really great book!—Ralph Levinson, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

From physicist Scott M. Tyson’s bookThe Unobservable Universe

“I downloaded a digital copy of [Biocentrism] in the privacy of my home, where no one could observe my buying or reading such a “New Agey” sort of cosmology book. Now, mind you, my motivation was not all that pure. It was my intention to read the book so I could more effectively refute it like a dedicated physicist was expected to. I consider myself to be firmly and exclusively entrenched in the cosmology camp embodied by the likes of Stephen Hawking, Lisa Randall, Brain Greene, and Edward Witten. After all, you know what Julius Caesar said: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” I needed to know what the other camps were thinking so I could better defend my position. It became necessary to penetrate the biocentrism camp.

The book had the completely opposite effect on me. The views that Dr. Lanza presented in this book changed my thinking in ways from which there could never be retreat. Before I had actually finished reading the book, it was abundantly obvious to me that Dr. Lanza’s writings provided me with the pieces of perspective that I had been desperately seeking. Everything I had learned and everything I thought I knew just exploded in my mind and, as possibilities first erupted and then settled down, a completely new understanding emerged. The information I had accumulated in my mind hadn’t changed, but the way I viewed it did— in a really big way.”

I spent a couple of years rolling pennies and eating canned spinach and pasta while I tried to understand the universe.

U.S. News & World Report Cover Story

“…his mentors described him [Lanza] as a “genius,” a “renegade” thinker, even likening him to Einstein.”

“Robert Lanza is the living embodiment of the character played by Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting. Growing up underprivileged in Stoughton, Mass., south of Boston, the young preteen caught the attention of Harvard Medical School researchers when he showed up on the university steps having successfully altered the genetics of chickens in his basement. Over the next decade, he was to be “discovered” and taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B. F. Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His mentors described him as a “genius,” a “renegade” thinker, even likening him to Einstein.”

We’re taught that the universe can be fundamentally divided into two entities: ourselves and that which is outside of us. But you’re not an object — if you divorce one side of the equation from the other you cease to exist.

New experiments suggest part of us exists outside of the physical world. We assume there’s a universe “out there” separate from what we are, and that we play no role in its appearance. Yet experiments show just the opposite.

Ideally, our concepts of nature and God should adapt to our evolving scientific knowledge. Relative to the supreme creator, we humans would be much like the microorganisms we scrutinize under the microscope.

Biocentrism unlocks the cage Western science has unwittingly confined itself. By allowing the observer into the equation opens new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death.

We take physics as a kind of magic and think everything just popped into existence one day out of nothingness. But we’re living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that life is an insignificant part of the physical universe, to one in which we’re the origin.

We’re about to be broadsided by the most explosive event in history. But it won’t be rockets that take us the next step. Sometime in the future science life will finally figure out how to escape from its corporeal cage.

Everyone knows that something is screwy with the way we visualize the cosmos. Theories of its origins screech to a halt when they reach the very event of interest — the moment of creation, the “Big Bang.”

If we could see before the first single-cell organism, and after the last man and woman, only you would remain — you, the Great Face behind, that consciousness whose mode of thinking that contains the world.

We think of time and consciousness in human terms. But like us, plants possess receptors, microtubules and sophisticated intercellular systems that likely facilitate a degree of spatio-temporal consciousness.

Did you ever wonder why people like Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson didn’t fare any better than you or I despite all their money, fame, and access to people of wisdom? The answer lies in your own backyard.

It seems natural that someday we’ll make machines that’ll think and act like people. However, for a machine or computer there’s no other principle but physic, and the chemistry of the atoms that compose it.